Happy Birthday Curiosity

It’s been over a year since the NASA Curiosity Rover landed on Mars.

I say landed…

… this exploratory device, the size of a small car, was landed to within 2.5km of its target destination on the surface of a planet that’s three hundred and fifty million miles away.  Landed, dear readers, by use of a floating jet pack.  Let’s just take a moment to remember that before we move onto the next thing.  I even remember the day Curiosity landed – mostly, because the Olympics were on, and I’d just seen a crowd go wild for someone winning something, only to switch over and see footage of a room of NASA engineers putting a stadium of tens of thousands to shame for sheer ecstatic glee.

Anyhow, one year later and what can we say?  We can say that man can get to Mars, and land safely on it.  NASA can, for the first time, show the world actual pictures from the surface of an alien planet, and mankind has a thing it created, fully functional, exploring the surface of another world.  Endless data about geology, radiation, atmosphere, chemistry and the environment are pouring in from Curiosity, delayed a few minutes by the distance between Earth and Mars as we orbit about each other.  And finally, Curiosity has uncovered evidence of water.  Our nearest neighbour, it seems, was once a place of flowing rivers and standing lakes; the first requisite for life as we understand it.  Is that the same as saying there was life on Mars?  Not at all.  But it’s a magnificent first step in rebuilding the history of what might have been, once upon a time, and a suggestion perhaps that, if water could exist so readily in our own solar system, perhaps the odds are going up that life may exist in staggering quantity beyond.

Meanwhile, in France, a scientist cautiously declared that we may only be ‘forty years’ away from having efficient nuclear fusion technology.  A clean, renewable, massive energy source which may yet save the human race from the environmental disaster it has wrought; while in London, a burger grown entirely in the laboratory was tested and declared not that bad really – and probably better than Aldi’s finest – by gourmet restaurant critics.

Few people ask me if I believe in God any more, mostly because been there, had that conversation.  But, something I sometimes forget to say is this: that when mankind landed a fully functioning scientific wonder on an alien planet; when food was grown without it having to be injected with antibiotics or the slaying of an animal; and when a man in France shrugged nonchalantly and hoped to live to see reactors running in his lifetime with the potential to free humanity from self-destruction, I came as close to a sense of holy wonder and hope as I have ever been.